Musk unashamedly describes his ketamine regimen in the same terms as one might have heard someone a generation ago opening up in public about their SSRI prescription. Thus in a 2024 interview with Don Lemon, he explained that “I have sort of a…negative chemical state in my brain, like depression I guess…and ketamine is helpful for getting one out of the negative frame of mind.” Rick Perry, an avatar of Texas uprightness, was converted to the psychedelic cause after meeting the Navy SEAL veteran Marcus Luttrell in 2006. Luttrell was suffering from PTSD. In June, Perry told the Texas Tribune that the question he gets the most these days is: “What is a right-wing antidrug governor doing associated with psychedelics?” The answer for him is simple: It has everything to do, as he put it elsewhere, with “the mental health problems that we created by being at war for damn near two decades.”

You can call this hypocrisy if you want. It’s true that many of the people now praising psilocybin or ibogaine came up cheering the drug war that tore lives apart for far less. But cultural property does not come with a deed. And the cultural objects that seem to hold the power of radical transformation, transformation beyond the ordinary expectations that attach to our civic roles or our professional identities, typically belong to the political and cultural faction that has historical force and momentum behind it. Only one side gets to hold the fire at any given moment. Only one side can afford to come across as reckless. Recklessness, you might say, is a measure of cultural power.

This time, however, it is a recklessness tempered by utilitarian ends: The veteran must show measurable signs of improvement, the psychedelics must be tested against placebos, and so on. Nowhere is the subordination of the potentially transformative experience of psychedelics to practical aims, to “life-maxxing,” clearer than in Silicon Valley. Bryan Johnson, the ultimate life-maxxer, who is currently waging a personal campaign against death itself, recently took time out of his quest for immortality to document his experiences with psilocybin. “Hey all,” he would later write, on X. “I’m just so happy to be alive.” The experience is supposed to be somehow connected to his supreme goal of longevity, but its effect appears to be more one of existential reconciliation, the sort of equanimity that does not typically characterize the problem-solving ethos of the professional biohacker. “People assume I am fearful of death,” Johnson wrote further. “I’m not.”